JUSTICEIn the days when Swabia was one of the five grand duchies and the Schlegerbund were a great power in the land there came to the town of Ravensburg a man named Nikolaus Makri, who had fled from Lombardy upon a tide of dark rumors, which alleged that he was overactive in the cause of change and progress.
Swabia’s nobles considered theirs a more advanced realm than decadent Lombardy, and so Makri was made welcome there—all the more so because he claimed to be a wise and artful physician, and also to be expert in the amputation of limbs. In Swabia the work of surgery had long been the prerogative of barbers rather than physicians, but the march of progress had reduced the barbers’ guild to a mean and powerless thing. The status of barbers was so reduced that they had little enough succ
